Constant shifts in perspective and playful music and visuals dynamise this Catalan production of English playwright Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love (2010), translated by Cristina Genebat and directed by Julio Manrique. The title is taken from the famous Beatles’ track. The time-leaping production begins in 1967. Kenneth (a self-consciously suave David Selvas) is a 19-year-old Oxford… Read more »
One of Spain’s very first road deaths took place on a hairpin bend in 1927 Ourense, a province of the northwestern region of Galicia. The deceased, one José Fernández España y Vigil, was a civil engineer employed to study the layout of the southern bypass of the railroad – a proposed new section of the… Read more »
Antoni Benaiges was born in 1903 into a Catalan family of rural republicans living in Montroig, Tarragona. He trained as a ‘mestre’, a teacher, and on graduating found work in a mixed school in a tiny village in Bañuelos de Bureba, Burgos. There, in a brief two years, Benaiges quietly revolutionised the lives of the… Read more »
“In Cádiz where I was born there was a place I loved called Palacio de la Moda. You’d go in and there were mirrors everywhere: on the walls, on the ceiling. You drowned in the spectacle of yourself.” José Troncoso is director of La Estampida, a Spanish theatre collective that burst onto the scene eight… Read more »
The judges at Jocs Florals d’Olot in 1898 reacted in shock when they discovered the author of the prize-winning short story Infanticide was in fact a woman, Catalina Albert i Paradis. It was simply unheard of that one of youth and privilege from the pretty L’Escala in coastal Empordà (Catalonia) could be capable of broaching… Read more »
As the third part in an open-ended trilogy, Made of Space, created by the accomplished Barcelona-based duo Maria Campos and Guy Nader, pushes further (or higher) an ambitious examination of the principles of physics: matter and its motion through space-time, energy, force and the workings of nature. Precision Challenging in its abstract premise, yet open… Read more »
When the prestigious choreographer Marta Carrasco convinced Albert Hurtado, the charismatic zumba teacher at her local gym to cross-dress before a live audience at the TNC, how could he refuse? The result, the breezy performance piece Jo, dona. A Lili Elbe., a heartfelt tribute to Lili Elbe: a Danish landscape painter and transgender woman, and… Read more »
Citing the influence of physicist Stephen Hawking and the author Jorge Luis Borges, and using Bernard Herrmann’s musical score from the Hitchcock film Vertigo for its scene changes, 4D Òptic by the Argentine playwright and director Javier Daulte marks an exciting trip into 2019. This “restoration, not revival,” of Daulte’s 2004 play is absolutely in… Read more »
In the entertaining thriller play Cronología de las Bestias, written and directed by the Argentine Lautaro Perotti, Spanish actress Carmen Machi is unforgettable as Olvido, a beer-swilling mother with a strange fixation on the washing machine, whose missing son Beltrán shows up behind the sofa after a 12 year absence. Instantly recognised by his antsy aunt… Read more »
Elisabet Casanovas gives an impressive yet exhausting performance as Kassandra. This excessively didactic play by Sergio Blanco is based on the figure of Greek tragedy who was cursed with the power of prophecy yet further cursed to never be believed. This familiar part of the tale was dropped in near the end with a tarot card… Read more »
